Yesterday, the Obama campaign attempted to embarrass Mitt Romney in his home state with Obama's top advisor David Axelrod holding a press conference to trash Romney in Boston, but quickly found itself the subject of ridicule when the Romney campaign decided to fight back. Or, in the words of Ed Driscoll of PJ Media, "Alinsky, you magnificent bastard, I read your book."
The Romney campaign did not take kindly to Axelrod attacking their candidate down the street from campaign headquarters and, echoing the leftist organizer Saul Alinksy's "Rules for Radicals," decided one dirty trick deserved another. So they sent staff, interns and volunteers to attend Axelrod's event and berate him back.
With chants of So-lyn-dra, "where are the jobs?" and boos, the Romney camp pushed back, leaving Axelrod flatfooted. At one point, Axelrod was so flummoxed by the sudden opposition that he literally shouted at the protesters "You can't handle the truth."
Politics, folks, is a knife fight. And the Romney campaign is proving quickly, as Buzzfeed's McKay Coppins put it, that it's not the gun-shy McCain campaign. It's willing to rumble and throw some punches.
Some people whine about tactics like crashing an opponent's event, and usually it does backfire on the protesters, but in this case it was perfect. Axelrod was there with the explicit purpose to embarrass Romney on his home turf and instead was the one who ended up looking foolish.
As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey put it “David Axelrod got a large, unpleasant lesson in Chapter One of This Ain’t 2008 Anymore.”